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The Politics of Downtown Development: Dynamic Political Cultures in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Stephen J. McGovern. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.
One of the seeming realities of modern life is that municipalities have to make themselves attractive to investors or watch the money head down the road to a friendlier climate. The academic version of this view was largely shaped by Paul Peterson's City Limits (1981), which detailed the constraints within which municipal governments work. Stephen McGovern tells a very different story, one in which the citizens affected by downtown development can force changes in land-use policy, and do so in a way that ensures the benefits of growth are shared equitably and capital does not grow wings and fly away.
His primary concern is not land-use policy itself but local political cultures, and the role individuals have in shaping them. More specifically, he investigates the possibility of replacing the hegemony of free-market, private investment with a Gramscian counterhegemony. In McGovern's view this would be a progressive political culture in which (1) policy is set in the public sphere, led by government intervention rather than private investment, and (2) policy direction is controlled not by bureaucratic managers or some other elitist hierarchy but through the mass participation of citizens. Such a culture would be characterized by an egalitarian ethic.
In these terms, the comparison of downtown development in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in the 1970s and 1980s provides a stark contrast of success and failure. In San Francisco, growth-control activists challenged the widely accepted notion that commercial development in the downtown would provide benefits for everyone by expanding the tax base and position the city well in the emerging postindustrial economy. These activists were fighting...